Projects

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

At the end of last week the rewards from the Robotech Kickstarter was delivered to my house. Unfortunately during that time my cat was in the veterinarian hospital for a week so the package got glanced through and then shelved. Today I actually got a chance to take a closer look and try my hand at putting together a model. I picked out one of the basic Zentradi Battlepods as it looks like I have about 20 of them in my order.

Parts for a Regult BattlePod cut from the sprue. Please excuse the blurry phone pics.

The plastic models are nice and I had no problem cleaning them up for assembly. The details seem well defined although I won't know for sure till I start painting I guess. However, there are a fair number of parts per model and especially the little guns are more than a bit fiddly.

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Assembled and with a 28mm figure along side for scale.

The only other complaint is that the "hip" section is really narrow and in order to get the legs to glue on in even a static pose I had to glue the legs on so that they weren't flush to the hip joint. I'll have to see if this was just an error on my part in assembling or something I'm going to have to get used to. The other small complaint I have is that although there are a bunch of pieces to each figure there isn't very much pose-ability. I can see alot of converting ahead for me as I try to get all of the mecha looking a little more individualistic. I'll probably try assembling a Veritech next and see what they are like as well.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

My test piece hallway is pretty much finished up now. After the previous round of painting I added some work with weathering powders and some new details. The carved out niche got some old candles, and a discarded sword and a bronze urn were placed near the central pillar. The candles were made from pieces of plastic rod, liquid greenstuff added for melted wax and a piece of wire for the wick. The urn was carved from some modelling clay and is a little rough but works alright. The sword was snipped from the Gripping Beast Saxon Thegns plastic set and was hacked up a bit to give it some age.

After the details were added I went to work with my weathering powders. I think the wall turned out alright but I put way too much on the floor. I then ended up going back in to tone the stones and dirt down more, which led to a bit of a downward spiral. Eventually I got it back to something I'm happy with again. After that I slapped some grayish dust on everything and moved on.

Flooring after lots of cursing and repainting.

The larger gateway piece got some more work as well. I puzzled over how exactly to assemble the front so that the hillside blended into the piece but didn't make the interior part to hard to access. I finally settled on making the front part fixed and having a removable section over the corridor. After some carving and lots of test fitting I got a roof made. I tried to make it look like corbelled stone slabs and even though I don't think they'll be seen too much during play I still like them. After that I built up the hill by gluing on some loose pieces of foam to bulk it out. Then I mixed up a paste of glue, wood filler, water, and cut up scraps of foam. I used this to smooth out the shape. I'm hoping that it will work as a light weight filler which I'll apply the ground work over.

My wife thinks that it looks like a cat threw up all over the top of it. Hopefully the resemblance will fade in future stages.

The underside of the roof section.

Corridor with roof removed and a couple of Saxons. So far its not too bad moving them around we'll see if it stays that way when its all done.